• This. Housing is definitely a human right and it is generally provided in Australia.

      Where it gets more complex is how much should housing cost and what quality of housing should people get for their money? For example can you afford a house to yourself, or do you need to live with other people and share the rent? Maybe even share a bedroom?

      Australia doesn’t have a shortage of housing, what we have is a shortage of affordable housing. As in, some people aren’t able to pay for the houses that they want to live in and they aren’t willing to live in the ones that they can afford.

      Domestic violence is the leading cause of homelessness in Australia. Victims of that often do have a home but it’s not a safe one, so they’re actually better off on the street. With help, these victims can find a home (and help is available).

  •  kowcop   ( @kowcop@aussie.zone ) 
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    311 months ago

    In my mind, the only way to fix the housing crisis is to implement policy which will effectively collapse the housing market, and that would be a suicidal move by any party so they just wont do it. Every day is some story of the Government’s attempt to fix it, the latest was building 3,000 appartments next to the Metro at Macquarie Park. In what world does anyone think these things will be affordable when they are 30 mins from the city and a walk to the metro?

    The only ways I can see to fix it is to grandfather capital gains tax discounts on investments and kill AirBNB

    Also, while I like the notion of affordable housing, I don’t think it is possible to build. Nothing is affordable these days. Affordable labour and materials don’t really exist…

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:


    It was scornful of the way private landlords had historically treated renters in this country, and said housing was a right and should stop being a “field of investment” that yielded high profits for a minority of landowners.

    At the same time, there was strong growth around Australia in owner-building, made possible by the large number of prematurely subdivided blocks and vacant allotments that were sitting idle in major cities from the pre-war era.

    According to the late Professor Patrick Troy, by the mid-1990s Australian governments were recreating the social conditions that had originally led to the demands for a national public housing program in the 1940s.

    “Surely we need our tax system to enable opportunity for everyone to have secure access to one home before incentivising a minority to have many,” former NSW Planning Minister, Rob Stokes, said at the at the same event.

    And they said the private sector had repeatedly failed to build adequate housing for low-income groups in Australia, suggesting that governments should accept responsibility for doing so.

    “The Commission considers that the housing of the people of the Commonwealth adequately, soundly, hygienically, and effectively, each according to his social and economic life is a national need, and, accordingly, should cease to be a field of investment yielding high profits,” they concluded.


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